Horror has to be one of the most maligned genres. While not everyone may like Romantic Comedies or Musicals or War Movies, I think it would be rare to hear a fan of these genres asked, “Why do you watch that awful stuff?” or told, “I’m surprised you watch these movies – you’re such a nice person.” It’s obvious that, going back many decades at least, there is an assumption of Sadism – of pleasure taken in (watching) the suffering of others. While I can’t deny the presence of that tendency (of course, there are moments when many a horror fan thrills at an “awesome kill”), I think the act of viewing this material is much more complicated, often rooted, in fact, in the opposite—in a kind of Masochism.
Why watch a horror film, after all, if you don’t want to be scared, or disgusted, or disturbed, or somehow assaulted (all typically negative experiences)? I think we often watch in order to be on the receiving end of the harm (in a safe way that leaves no marks). We want the intensity of that experience, to undergo that trial.
And I’m not alone in this view. Carol J. Clover is most famous as a horror academic for coining the term “final girl” in her discussion of the Slasher subgenre, but I feel her actual focus in Men, Women, and Chainsaws is rather a question of identification on the part of the horror audience, often in terms of gender; while horror viewers (generally thought to overwhelmingly be male) are often assumed to identify with the killer, stalking and murdering young women with sharp phallic objects in an obvious sexual metaphor, she observed and theorized about those same male viewers rather identifying with (or fluidly shifting identification between the killer and the) “final girl,” both masochistically sharing her suffering and vicariously sharing in her violent victory.
And so if there is a kind of masochism to viewership, to what does it extend? Only to being startled or disgusted, or might it also include being criticized—morally or ethically interrogated? Do we just want to have a fun roller coaster scare ride, or do we appreciate when a film maker really sets out to give us a hard time, implying that perhaps we should question our enjoyment of this content, even perhaps directly trying to give us a bad, frustrating, unsatisfactory experience to make a point? Is that something we can value in a film, or do we just get tired of feeling scolded? Of course mileage may vary, but with that question in mind, I’d like to look at three films that I feel, in some way criticize the genre, and to varying degrees the viewer: Funny Games (2007), Berberian Sound Studio (2012), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012). All will be discussed in detail, so if you want to avoid spoilers, I recommend watching them first.
Funny Games (2007)
Michael Haneke’s scene by scene English language remake of his own German language 1997 original is a direct provocation of the viewer. While it sets up a very effective, dread filled, brutal home invasion thriller, it subverts audience expectations at every turn, purposely frustrating the viewer, questioning point blank if this violence is what the viewer actually desires, and, by implication, also asking why?
A family comes to their summer house for a vacation. Once there, they are intimidated, put upon, and ultimately held hostage, tortured, and killed by a pair of polite young men, dressed for golf, one of whom periodically breaks the fourth wall, implicating the audience in their “funny games.” It is a kind of Brechtian spin on Straw Dogs, regularly breaking the flow of the narrative to address the viewer’s desires. Interestingly for a piece this uncomfortable and frequently brutal, the film refuses to show any actual violence. Everything happens when the camera is looking the other way. Most strikingly, during a scene in which a young boy is killed with a shotgun, the camera has followed the other killer into the kitchen to watch him fix himself a sandwich.
This is followed by the killers leaving the man and woman tied up and broken, with their dead son in the corner. The camera is now unflinchingly still (it doesn’t cut and barely moves for about 9 minutes) as we sit with them in their grief and pain. Furthermore, the pace of the whole film now slows down as we watch them attempt to get away and get help. The killers aren’t seen again for almost a whole hour and I feel that we are meant to want them back just so that something will happen. We should be frustrated and bored, and therefore criticized for sadistically wanting to instead see more pain.
When they do return, once again tormenting the couple, one of the young men, Paul, asks us “Do you think it’s enough? I mean, you want a real ending, right? With plausible plot development, don’t you?” For a short moment, we are given that as the wife gets ahold of the gun and shoots Peter, the other tormentor. This is the satisfying moment of vengeance we’ve been waiting for, we’ve been set up to expect, and it’s the only on screen violence in the whole film, but it is immediately stolen away as Paul picks up the TV remote and rewinds the film. The scene plays out again, but she does not get to rise and revenge. Her husband is killed and later, so is she. The young men go on to the next house.
One may wonder why I’ve chosen this version and not the original to discuss and it is because I feel this one is even more pointed at me, at an American Horror/Thriller/Violent Film viewer. As I understand it, the reason Haneke remade his own film in English was that he felt the original had been seen and appreciated by European film critics but that it had really missed its true target audience and that those people wouldn’t watch a movie with subtitles. His intention was to poke at me, or viewers like me – to criticize the fact that I/we want to see such violence, expect to see it, are unsatisfied if we don’t see it.
It is a fascinating, frustrating, savvy, and sometimes intellectually dishonest viewing experience (which is rather the point) – a provocation on American popular culture, violent visual entertainment, and even the very idea of narrative cinema itself, in its inherent manipulation. It is a film you choose to subject yourself to.
Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
Though I just wrote about Peter Strickland’s somewhat-tribute to stylish Italian Horror a week ago, I’ve been wanting to dig more deeply into it for quite a while now. On one level, it is the total opposite of a movie like Funny Games, richly enveloping the viewer in a thoroughly non-cerebral, surreal, sensual, nigh-hypnotic experience. But it does share some elements with the former film.
The most obvious of these is that once again, we do not see a single shot of violence throughout the entire run time. And really, no violence actually takes place. This is the story of a very English sound engineer, Gilderoy, who comes to Italy to work on a horror film. Nothing violent happens outside of that film – which we never see. But we do hear it, and even if we see how these sounds are being produced (largely in the mutilation of fruit and vegetables and the obsessive twiddling of dials and knobs), those sounds are quite disturbing.
Secondly, I feel that while it, to some extent, celebrates the style and creativity of Italian Horror of the 70s, I also feel that the film shares some of its protagonist’s unease with the subject matter. The story is all about his discomfort – in Italy, working with this horrific material, necessarily getting caught up imaginatively in the audio performance of mutilations and violations, feeling pulled into something he does not like, his life and his art and himself all blurring together in a nightmarish manner. In one scene, as he rips radish roots to create the sound of a witch’s hair being torn out you can see a flash of sadistic pleasure on his face as he destroys the vegetables, immediately followed by revulsion, by guilt.
And my feeling was that the film was there with him, sharing in this complex of reactions. His journey is our journey. We never see these horrors, but we do imagine them, enjoy them (the film truly deals in sensory pleasure), and find them distasteful, by virtue of experiencing them through his eyes, his ears, his hands (as they stab a cabbage or crush a melon).
And while we are given mouthpieces to defend the film under creation, they come off (I suspect intentionally) poorly. In one scene, Santini, the film’s director, who refuses the title “horror” for his work, responds to Gilderoy’s objections: “I hate what was done to these beautiful women, but it is my duty to show. The world must know the truth and see the truth. I hate it.” In the moment, he sounds so disingenuous and pretentious, just bald-faced placation of a worker to achieve the needed labor.
By the end, the film goes to some truly odd places, but among them, we are given a scene in which Gilderoy effectively tortures a voice actor, subjecting her to deafening awful sounds in order to eke out her requisite screams. Ultimately, she gives him what he wants before she storms off and he is left to reckon with his own cruelty and monstrosity. We are left to sit with his horror of himself, with our horror of our own pleasures.
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Of these three films, this is the only one I’ve watched multiple times, but it is no less trenchant a criticism of horror fandom. Described by co-screenwriter, Joss Whedon, as “a loving hate letter to the horror genre,” it is both a joyous jubilee of horror elements, monsters, and icons, and a direct judgement of what our enjoyment of these films consists in.
Simply described, we follow a group of young people who go to the eponymous cabin in the woods for a weekend of partying as they are manipulated into embodying certain stereotypical horror characters – the slut, the jock, the stoner, the virgin, etc., so they can be killed by monsters of their inadvertent choosing, all as a part of a ritual, orchestrated by a well-organized and well-heeled team in a subterranean control room in order to placate ancient evil gods, thus stopping them from awakening and destroying humanity.
Time and time again, we see how these young people are not the stereotypes they are set up to be, but how they are being made into them. One otherwise perfectly intelligent young woman who has recently dyed her hair is drugged by that hair dye, such that she becomes the ditzy blonde who takes her top off and dies first. The sensible young man, studying sociology on a full academic scholarship is similarly drugged to become more aggressive, to be an ‘alpha-male asshole.’
Time after time, we see how they would make sensible decisions but that they are manipulated to instead carry out the tropes of a (certain kind of) horror film. After stabbing an undead threat, an electrical charge is emitted from a knife, causing a girl to drop it (why else would she?); just when everyone should stay together and explore the house, gas is released so that they instead split up. At every turn, things are made to play out in the most rote, expected, sometimes stupid ways.
This is perhaps most explicit in the sex scene that precedes the first murder of the film. A boy and a girl have gone outside to fool around, but she’s cold and it’s too dark. We cut to the control room, where a group of men are all watching eagerly, waiting for her to undress. They increase the temperature, turn up the moonlight, and release pheromones into the air around the young couple. Moments later, she straddles her partner, takes off her shirt and is soon after stabbed through the hand before being caught by a bear trap and finally beheaded.
It is here that we have a key moment of dialogue. A security officer, new to the job and uncomfortable with the sleazy eagerness of the men around him, questions if it is really important that they all see her naked. The two men running the show respond, “We’re not the only ones watching, Truman.” “Gotta keep the customer satisfied. You know what’s at stake here?” This was the moment, when I saw this in the cinema, when I really fell for this film. Later we learn that it’s all about Lovecraftian Great Old Ones, but in that moment, it felt like WE, the viewers, were the real monster—we are who must be satisfied. And we will only be satisfied by gratuitous sex and violence.
This is often described as a horror-comedy, satirizing the tropes of modern horror films, but I really think it goes farther in criticizing us for wanting these tropes, for wanting to see these things. It directly calls out the sadism of the viewing experience. Late in the film, Dana, the assigned final girl realizes that “They don’t just want to see us killed. They want to see us punished” for being young, for being sexual, for having fun. In this, we have a direct criticism of the much discussed Reagan-era slasher formula of Sex = Death. And we are criticized for wanting to see it, for wanting to see it play out in a certain specific way and in a certain specific order. It is a key plot point that the “virgin” has to be the last one standing – that everyone else must die before her and while she may live, first she must suffer. And it is our fault, because it is what we want to see.
There have been plenty of other satirically knowing horror films that have a laugh at the expense of the common tropes: Behind the Mask, Scream, Jason X, the list could go on and on. But I think this one really calls us, the viewers, to task, all while also delivering a flick that is really (unlike Haneke’s) terrifically fun, and celebratory of the many elements of horror that we, the viewers, so love (what fan hasn’t paused to see all of the monsters listed on the big board when they are betting, or also paused during the gleeful ‘system purge’ scene to identify the inspiration for all the monsters on parade?). We are generally given what we want, but we’re also scolded for it.
How We See this Criticism
So here is the tricky part: if these movies all attack us the viewer as I’ve described, how do we feel about it? How do we take this in? How do we respond? Without some large questionnaire, it is impossible for me to really speak for the whole of horror fandom, but I have done a cursory survey of viewer reviews online (google and rotten tomatoes) of these three and it is noteworthy for me that I rarely see this criticism concretely addressed.
When Funny Games is liked, it is often for being a successful, scary, brutal thriller, and sometimes for its media criticism. When it is disliked, it is often because the pace slows down in the second half and it’s boring, or the characters are unlikeable, or that it doesn’t have a happier ending.
When Berberian Sound Studio is liked, it is often because it is beautiful, atmospheric, imaginative, disturbing, and/or unsettling. When it is disliked, it is because it is boring, weird, too artsy, or pretentious.
When The Cabin in the Woods is liked, it is because it is successful as a comedy-satire, because someone appreciates the inclusion of ‘Great Old Ones,’ or because someone enjoys the fan favorite elements of spot-the-horror-reference. When it is disliked, it is because it isn’t scary, it isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, or seemingly because someone didn’t really get the point at all and they are complaining about the “clichés.”
Ok, a quantitative literature review, this is not. But these are the general trends I’ve seen and I find it interesting that I never really see backlash (or appreciation, for that matter) to the sense of being judged as a viewer (maybe occasionally with Haneke, but I feel I’ve seen that mostly from critics rather than viewers). All three have their admirers and detractors, but I haven’t really seen signs of viewers taking it personally. Perhaps this indicates that the critique is generally accepted (negative results still constitute useful data) but I have no reason to believe that to be true. Still, I am left to wonder if I am receiving them differently than others. Am I just projecting my own sometime ambivalence? Should I investigate my own response further?
Speaking Only for Myself
I suppose at the end of the day, I do take the critique; sometimes it’s earned, and I feel generally ok about that. I think that human beings are vastly complex beasts and we all have dark little imps to feed. Sometimes, we do enjoy the suffering of others (and there is nothing wrong about indulging this in a way that doesn’t actually harm anyone – horror fiction is one method, but I also know a guy who likes to read about mountain climbers because their ordeals make him feel better about his life), and sometimes we want to get a bit (or more) battered ourselves. If at the end of a film, I feel exhausted, wrung out, like I’ve got nothing left, I’m probably pretty satisfied, even if the experience was unpleasant.
As a fan of horror, I take in a lot of this content and I know I occasionally get inured to it. For my part, I don’t feel it de-sensitizes me to real life suffering, but when you partake in a lot of a certain kind of fiction, it’s easy to do so from a remove, like a worker in a control room, just monitoring knobs, waiting for something out of the ordinary to happen, but otherwise, even a bit bored. And I don’t feel it’s beyond the pale for someone, the artist making the work that I’m watching, to call me out and inquire if that is actually as it should be—if I feel good about that, and sometimes I do not.
I want to see beautiful things and perceive that beauty. Similarly, when I view the horrific, I want to be horrified. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of that, to try to approach work with fresh eyes, to be open to the experience – to be open to critique and take what’s coming to you.
